In all of my previous blogs, I have been talking a lot about social media. Are you tired of it now? I know I am.

I’m tired of living my life in public. Tired of the people who use Twitter as a tool for CONVERSATION. Tired of not being able to do silly things for fear that someone might take a video of it and upload on Facebook. Tired of having to check the feeds every few minutes. Tired of the people who click “like” on stupid status updates like “I hate burbs.” Tired of the fact that social media turns people into annoying pricks. Tired of the people who chat on their BB when they are sitting with friends. Tired of the phony people who use social network as a means to promote themselves. Tired of endless application notifications. Tired of “friend requests” from people I have never known in my life. Tired of companies adopting social media as a way to “understand” their consumers. Tired of the people who put “It’s complicated” as their relationship status. Tired of the people who comment “good photo” on photos that are not. I am tired of everything.

If you are feeling like me, there is a way out. The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine can liberate us all. This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill all your fake virtual friends, and completely end your life in the Web 2.0 world. The cool thing is you get to write a testimony of your death too.

So long, goodbye.

My initial reaction was: “What the fuck?”

I mean, if this is some cheap-ass, cash-cow movie made by some greedy studio, in an attempt to make money because they know people who use Facebook would be interested, I wouldn’t be that surprised. But this is David Fincher! And the script was written by the Golden Globe nominated screenwriter/producer Aaron Sorkin, who adapted it from a book named The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal.

Should I get my hope up for this? I know people who have read the screenplay described it as “Unpredictable, Funny, Touching and Sad.” But seriously, it’s a Facebook movie starring Justin Timberlake! What could be more wrong?

With the collapse of transaction costs, people are free to create and share any kind of material they want, venturing out into the domains of specific interests that no traditional media had the guts to take on. Niche groups are formed; niche music is made available; niche photographs are shared; niche videos are uploaded; niche websites are created, and so on. Most of these are user-generated contents, but some are pirated contents that people illegally share with one another.

There is a term for this phenomenon, popularized by Chris Anderson, who is an author of a book with the same name. It’s called, “The Long Tail.”

It’s very simple really. We live in a physical world, and until recently, most of our businesses did too. This automatically puts two limitations on available products.

The first is the need to find local audience. You would not launch an Apple Store in some remote rural area, even though there are over 75 million Mac users in the world, precisely because there are no local demands there and that’s what you really need. A retailer cannot exist unless there are local demands that will generate enough revenues to cover the costs of running it in the first place. Once that is taken care of, another problem poses itself: what products should be included in the inventory? The answer, obviously, is products that will generate sufficient demand to earn its keep. An average movie theatre will not show a film unless it can attract at least 1,500 people over a two-week run; that’s essentially the rent for a screen. An average record store needs to sell at least two copies of a CD per year to make it worth carrying; that’s the rent for a half inch of shelf space. And so on for other kinds of retailer. But each can pull only from a limited local population; a bookstore in Chiang Mai isn’t going to benefit from a demand for books of the people in Bangkok. This is why niche products, such as a record by the Antlers, aren’t commercially available even though they have large potential national audiences – the audiences are too spread out to be the potential customers of any particular retailer, and in the limit of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all.

The other limitation is physics itself. There are only so many TV channels that can be broadcasted in the cable, only so many radio stations that can be carried in the radio spectrum, only so many books that can be shelved in the bookstore, and so on.

Because of these two limitations, in order for retailers to attract as much local audience and make as much profit as possible, they have to fill their inventories with only contents that have high general appeal.

Yes I'm a green dinosaur.

But in the digital world, the two limitations disappear. Particularly in stores that offer products with unlimited perfect copyability such as music or movies, contents with low general appeal are equally worthy of being carried as contents with high general appeal, because even though only the top products have huge appeals, below them are the less popular products that still have demands, and the list of those products with low but existing demands are so long that, if combined, they end up generating about as much revenue as the top-selling products. For example, the average tangible book store stocks about 100,000 titles or less, yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 100,000 titles. Businesses are starting to learn that the products they previously dished out because they weren’t hits are actually a critical source of profit.

This is the Long Tail.

WHAT TO WRITE ABOUT?!

Community of Practice! Yes! I’m going to write about this.

Since small group communications and large broadcast outlets now exist as part of a single interconnected ecosystem (social media), people’s work is not the only thing that is made available, but their conversations as well. Because of this, people who share an interest, a craft, or a profession usually come together and form what is called a “community of practice,” or groups of people who share information and experiences in order to help each other improve. Examples of this are everywhere – within discussion boards, forums, newsgroups, social networking sites, and thousands more. Conversations are formed around shared photos, music, videos, weblog posts, and the like.

To give a personal example, in September 2009 I was writing a screenplay about a murderer when I realized I needed an ingenious way to murder someone, but no matter how much I thought about it, I couldn’t come up with a method I liked. Desperate, I tried posting for help in the discussion board of a website that I am a member of. Within three hours, I got twelve replies from the people I had never known in my life. They just dropped by and gave me their creative murder methods without getting anything tangible in return.

Why did they do it? The answer: social tools have made it much easier to form communities of practice. It would seem that in volunteering to answer my question, the answerers had taken the burden upon themselves. This may be true, but social tools have made transaction costs so low that those costs become negligible. Not only that the answerers lose very little, they might also gain something from helping others in the community of practice – it raises their statuses in the community. As Clay Shirky puts it, “By providing an opportunity for the visible display of expertise or talent, the public asking questions creates a motivation to answer in public as well, and that answer, once perfected, persists even if both the original asker and the answerer lose interest.” This is true for my case as well. The people who came to answer my questions ended up having an entertaining discussion between themselves and attracting even more people to participate. The thread now has a total of 44 posts.

If you don’t already know about it, soon you will. It’s inevitable, because this will be the year that is remembered as the year Project Natal was released to the public. It’s coming on Christmas 2010, and it is going to revolutionize the entertainment experience much like the way AVATAR revolutionized the movie experience.

At the E3 Expo last year, Microsoft officially announced Project Natal. Months before the E3, rumors had been spreading that Microsoft had been building some sort of 3D-capable motion tracking device for the Xbox 360. People were skeptical about it. Most of them didn’t think it was going to be a big deal; probably an upgraded version of Wii at the most.

But after witnessing the demonstration at the E3, however, they were all believers in Project Natal.

I had pretty much the same reactions after watching its demonstration videos from Youtube. I highly recommend you watch these two videos: Project Natal: Meet Milo and Introducing Project Natal

The Line Between Reality and Digital is Fading Away

We have seen these things before, in Sci-Fi movies and stuff. It had long been imagined that one day in the future, we would be able to effectively interact with the digital world without having to use a keyboard or a controller as a medium. I had always known that this was a possibility in a distant future; what shocked me is that it’s already a freaking reality RIGHT NOW.

Make no mistake, Project Natal isn’t just one of those motion-detecting camera like the one you use with the Wii. Natal evaluates trillions of body configurations EVERY FRAME, which is THIRTY TIMES A SECOND. Not only that, there’s also a near-infrared sensor that’s gauging depth and an array of microphones picking up sounds.

Natal is also not just a controller. “Your body as a controller” is practically its slogan right now, but it’s actually even more sophisticated than that. Because Natal acquires a 3D image of the room and has a real-time understanding of the player’s body within that room, the system actually turns the entire gaming environment (sound and all) into a control system.

Project Natal may start out as an entertainment system, but it won’t stop there. If you have watched the Meet Milo video I linked up there, you’ll know what I’m talking about. With the kind of sophisticated artificial intelligence that comes with Project Natal, the possibilities are endless, and it won’t all be used for good. The line between the real world and the wired is becoming thinner than ever. What will it mean for our lives? We wait and see.

- What is it? Identify.

The global media issue I have selected is… The Twitter.

- How can it prevail in your culture? Why is it popular? Identify those factors that popularize it.

The number one factor that made Twitter what it is today is its simplicity. Twitter has an extremely user-friendly interface, and it’s so damn easy to use.

Because it lets their users submit their feeds in a very short, condensed format (called microblogging), it’s a lot easier to get people to follow you on Twitter than it would be on weblogs or newsfeed.

In fact, I think the main reason Twitter has prevailed in our culture (total time spent on Twitter grew 3712% in one year) is because it realizes that people are basically lazy, and it takes advantage of that laziness. It has created a form of blogging that appealed to people who don’t want to spend a lot of time writing a blog, and to people who don’t want to spend a lot of time going to each individual website or blog and read them.

Another factor that is responsible for the popularization of Twitter is that its use of the “followers” system make people feel popular, and that their 140-word ramblings are actually being heard. You don’t know whether a blog you updated would be read by a friend or not, but if you write something on Twitter, you can be damned sure your feed would appear right on that person’s page. This, I think, is what draws a lot of people in, because we are all basically narcissistic, and Twitter is a place we can show it without shame. I mean, where else can you find an audience who will read about what you ate for dinner?

- How does it change or influence your decisions or perception culturalty?

Twitter changes my perception by acting as a filtering system for my daily information. There are way too many things on the internet that I could read about, but don’t have the time or the attention-span to read through it all, and that is where sites like Twitter or Digg comes in. Twitter provide information in 140 words or less, so basically what I do is I become a follower of people who share certain values or interests with me, such as Roger Ebert the movie critic, or Richard Dawkins the evolutionary biologist, and whenever I like I can scroll through these already filtered feeds that appear on my page, and pay attention only to them. Human attention is now the most important resource, and Twitter helps me to use it economically.

- Discuss if you have seen concerns or whether it is healthy to people’s perception.

The number one concern that I have with Twitter is that it is going to contradict its own fundamental principle very soon. I use Twitter because it filters and condenses the information that I would be exposed to, so I don’t have to scroll through every freaking feeds of every freaking website just to find what I want. When I began using Twitter and had less than ten followers, it was a perfect system. Within one page, I had access to the daily updates of Roger Ebert, Richard Dawkins, Errol Morris, and a few of my friends. Now though, there are 37 people I am following, and just scrolling through all their feeds each day is a tiresome task. Because Twitter automatically puts every new feed of the people you follow on your page, once you are following a lot of people, your attention span couldn’t keep up with the incoming information, and we are back to information overload again; now I don’t read every feed that appears on my page because I can’t extend that much attention to them. And I am only following 37 people — imagine someone who are following more than a hundred users; there’s no way they can extend their attention to all of the feeds. I’m guessing we will need another filtering system very soon.

A significant aspect of online collaborative production is that once the majority of people have access to a high-speed internet connection, there is no formal division between people anymore. With open-source, you no longer have to be loyal to the local communities you belong to, whether they are your country or your company. The same person can edit a Wikipedia article while drinking his morning coffee, then upload and tag photos on Flickr on the afternoon, and spend his evening writing codes for Linux. In the realm of open-source, this kind of behavior is perfectly acceptable; there is zero scrutiny from society. In traditional businesses, however, you just can’t do likewise.

So there is no formal division between people anymore. What’s the big deal, right?

Well, actually it is a very big deal, because it means that EVERYONE IS NOW COMPETING IN THE SAME PLATFORM, and I mean EVERYONE, from a merchant in Yugoslavia to a teenager in China to a woman in France to a company in Iraq, and so on. With complete cross-platform integration being the likely future, there is not many opportunities left for a new endeavor, unless of course if your start-up is either incredibly lucky or incredibly original.

I realize I didn’t go over cross-platform integration yet, and I’m going to do that now.

IDC predicts that the number of mobile web users will hit one billion by 2010. You and I know that in the near future, social media is going to get much more intense, because people will be able to access them from any place, at any time, within the blink of an eye.

Another trend that goes along with mobility is that social media sites are starting to become real time, and integrated with the rest of the web. Everything you do will be gathered and streamed together. It will be a truly interconnected ecosystem that can be accessed from any device or platform. Now, for example, if you upload a video on Youtube, the link of your video will be automatically posted on your Facebook and Twitter feeds.

Facebook Connect, another example of this, is a feature that lets you use your Facebook account on other participating websites, such as Digg or Vimeo. You can now import your whole Facebook identity, with your ID, name, photos, friends, and so on, onto other networks. The number of social media sites that are integrating their connections is growing. You can find friends from other networks, and your feeds from one network will show up in others. Those different platforms are starting to come together, and it’s happening right now.

What’s the problem with that? We look at the internet and we see a vast landscape with billions of users. We don’t see any scarcity, and so we don’t feel the need to rush in, but I’m going to explain why we might be wrong.

The best way to understand this is to think about the success of Wikipedia, and imagine what would happen if there are more than one Wikipedia. If we have ten versions of the free online encyclopedia, all with their own distinct brand, none of it would come close to being as successful as Wikipedia today. The same is true with social networks or photo sharing sites or other forms of collaborative productions. Transition costs are dramatically lower, but because people no longer has to be loyal to a single company but can contribute to many things at once, the new economics of resource lies with the human attention.

Here is why: multimedia and social networks have a mutual connection. Try going to a popular multimedia website (Youtube, Vimeo, Flickr, Deviantart, etc.) and click any photo, music, or video you see. You’ll notice, once you are in the multimedia page, that there is a “share this” function somewhere. Open the “share this” function, and you will see several icons or links for sites that you can share the multimedia with. What sites are on that list? The ones that we usually see are: Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, Stumble-Upon, Myspace, Live Spaces, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Reddit, and Livejournal.

Notice there are usually not more than ten of these options in a given website. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of other websites that could be put on this list of websites to share, and yet they are not here. Why? The answer is that there is, and always has been, a scarcity in human attention. There is an opportunity cost in undertaking something, because you give up the others. That cost in human attention wasn’t a very significant matter before, because we had other costs to worry about. But now that those other costs have virtually disappeared, human attention becomes the most important resource.

Yesterday, by accident, I found out that little piece of information.

ALL TEN BLOGS ARE DUE BEFORE MIDNIGHT OF FEBRUARY 28, 2010…

WHICH IS FREAKING TOMORROW!

Cursing myself for not having done more of them earlier, I begin my first of the seven remaining blogs…

——————————-

You know an invention has become mainstream when your mom starts using it. Yes, it’s official, the nightmare has come true: both my Mom and Dad are on Facebook. And Twitter, too.

Yes, I have blocked them from viewing my page or ignore their “friend request.” And, after doing so, felt a bit guilty for it. Is this weird? I have no idea, but after researching a bit, it seems that this “Parents on Facebook” phenomena is something a lot of young people are complaining about.

Look, there’s even a website for it, http://myparentsjoinedfacebook.com/

This whole thing made me think of something Mr. Ian, my Magazine & Feature Writing teacher, talked about a few months ago, which is how, on social networks, we have to ask people for a permission to be their friend. This is a very weird thing, because people don’t do this in real life, as far as I know. Imagine having to go up to each one of your co-worker and ask them “Can I be your friend?” It’s pretty lame.

But the most awkward situation of all comes when you don’t want someone to be able to connect to you. For example, what if you have a professional connection with someone –let’s say your boss — but you don’t want him to be able to enter your private life? If you “decline” a friend request from your boss or your co-worker, what kind of social impact does that create? Your declination, I think, would seem very rude to them. It would probably hurt their feelings a little bit.

But is it your fault? No. There are a lot of reasons why you would want to keep certain people off your social network. Now that  personal and communication and publishing are overlapping, it would be hard to distinguish whether something you said should be taken seriously. A lot of people have been fired because of what they personally publish via social media. You can be sure this is happening all the time, because there’s already a word for it: “dooced,” means “to be fired from you job because of the contents of your weblog.”

To me, this is interesting because it seems nobody has found the solution to this problem yet. They are still debating whether the old definition of “journalistic privilege” should be applied to amateur journalists.

One thing to remember is that there is no turning back. Social media is an event that cannot be undone. We have all came rushing this way, long before thinking if it is what we actually want. Now it has encompasses everything around us, and people with the old mindset are finding it hard to keep up. What if we are one of those people who DISLIKE social media? I used to be one of that; two years ago I looked at teenagers who use Hi5 or other social networks and I thought they were sheeps. Now I have to check my Facebook and Twitter account everyday, and I’m even writing a BLOG! A lot of things have changed. I fear for the people who won’t, or can’t adapt. How much disadvantage would they be in, simply by refusing to adopt this unstoppable social trend?

Once again, I have no idea.

The inevitable truth is that in a very short period of time, social media has become ubiquitous. We are already too familiar with it. We think we know the whole deal, and would usually tune out whenever a discussion of social media begins. This is especially true for the newer generations. And very especially true for newer generations who are studying in New Media major; in other word, us. We, as people who study/work in New Media, are probably already familiar with things like “The Long Tail,” “Open-Source,” “Mass-Amateurization,” “Aggregators,” and pretty much most of the aspects of social media.

We are like adults on an airplane, comfortably reading their magazine and watching the in-flight movie while enjoying the hot meal, perfectly oblivious to the the marvelous circumstance they are in. Someone who has never been on an airplane before might run in and give those adults a big shake, shouting in their ears, “Why are you not pressing your cheeks against the airplane windows like your children? For three million years your human ancestors have been walking and crawling and running on the land, lifting their heads to look at the birds and secretly wishing they could fly. Now, because of the wonderful power of the human imagination, combined with decades of endless work and thousands of experimentation, you, at this very moment, are able to fly through the air at high speed! What a marvelous incident this is! How can you not be shivering in awe?”

Asshole

Sadly, this is what most people I’ve talked to are like with social media. One of my friend said that the reason people didn’t pay attention to what I said was because “it’s something we already know all about.”

We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race. And with the ability to connect with social media via mobile device, pretty much every asshole living in a developed country has a camera, a printing press, and a worldwide distribution network right in their pocket. And yet, we are not in awe.

Well, screw us. Today I’m going to talk about the most boring, most painfully-obvious thing of all: the Wikipedia.

Throughout the history of civilization, if we wanted to accomplish something that requires mass collaboration, we had to create a hierarchical organization and assign roles to each member within it. The head of the organization had to take on the various costs of running the organizations, such as monitoring and directing the outputs of their employees and rewarding them with a paycheck. That was the only way any institution could function.

Wikipedia, the friendly encyclopedia that everyone is familiar with, is defying every rule of mass collaboration we have ever known. The success of Wikipedia alone is more than enough a demonstration of how different a world we are living in.

Since its beginning in 2001 onward, it has been a subject of relentless criticisms, the most common of which is: “That can’t work.” It’s no doubt a lot of people would think so. There’s no management, no responsibility, no financial reward. Anyone can come in and edit what they want, when they want, on the topics they want, however they want. We are trained to think that something like this would never work, and yet hundreds of millions of contributions in researching, writing, editing, and proofreading are made annually.

We all know how Wikipedia works, so I’m not going to go in to that. What I’m going to talk about is probably the two most perplexing questions about the Wikipedia: Why does anyone bother to contribute to Wikipedia in the first place, and how does it survive vandalism?

For the first question, the simple answer is that the motivations can be anything at all, other than getting paid. Some take it as a chance to display their knowledge and experiences to the community. Some take it as an opportunity to leave a noticeable mark on the world, which a common human desire. Some are motivated by the desire to do a good thing. Still some people are motivated by their discontentment; say you were reading an article and you notice a word is misspelled, which annoyed you, and so you fix it. Or maybe, acting out of your personal principle that people should have a freedom of speech, you recover an article on the word “fuck” that was deleted by someone else. The list goes on.

And now to the second question: how does Wikipedia survive disagreements, destructive behaviors, and vandalism? But before I go into that, let’s hear a story.

In the 60s, a Dutch anarchist group called Provo launched the “White Bicycle” program in Amsterdam.  They collected about a hundred bicycles, painted them white, and left them unlocked around the city. The idea was simple: you could pick up a white bicycle wherever you found it, ride it to your destination, and leave it there for the next person, who would then ride to their next destination and leave it, ad infinitum. The Provo came up with the White Bicycle program because they believed in the basic human goodness. Their experiment, however, was an almost instant failure.Within a month, all the bicycles had either been stolen or thrown in the canals.

The White Bicycle wasn’t the only program of this sort. There are always people who are optimistic enough to bet on the tendency of the human nature to be good. Many visionaries have come up with programs with core idea similar to the White Bicycle, but the cumulative results of these experiments is that programs that place their trust on unrestricted human nature have struggled with theft and vandalism, and most ended up collapsing completely.

How, then, is Wikipedia different? The White Bicycle program illustrates that no effort at creating group value can be successful without some form of governance. Without anyone in charge, how does Wikipedia survive vandalism? The answer is Wikipedia has mechanisms that enforce constructive behaviors and discourage destructive behaviors.

For example, every change to a Wikipedia article is documented individually, and they can be further edited or reverted. Say you added a paragraph to an article on Abortion, readers who come after you can view the recent contributions and see what you had edited, along with the date and time, then they can decide whether to edit what you had edited, leave it, or undo your edit completely. Their decision to do something with your revision will itself be subjected to further reviews and revisions, and this goes on indefinitely. This is how vandalisms are fixed very quickly and very easily. Researchers who study Wikipedia have documented several cases when complete deletions of articles’ contents on controversial subjects like abortion and Islam have been restored in less than two minutes.

Another defensive mechanism of Wikipedia is the ability to lock a page, preventing all but a few highly-trusted contributors to make changes to it until the persistent threats of vandalism have disappeared. This may seem to be in conflict with Wikipedia’s ideal of openness, but it’s corresponds to the original philosophy of Ward Cunningham, the programmer who developed the first wiki: let the community do as much as they possibly can, but where they can’t do the work on their own, add technological fixes.

Wikipedia has no formal managements, no job roles, no salary, no hierarchical work-flow; it’s a product of endless argumentations made by unpredictable and unequal contributions of non-expert contributors working out of their own varying personal motives, and yet it is creating a free global resource which has tremendous values for millions of people all over the world, daily. It’s almost like magic.

But the most wonderful thing is that Wikipedia, Linux, and Firefox are only the beginning of the open-source movement. A whole lot more is coming. http://www.last.fm/, for example, is a social music website that lets its users collaboratively build a database of bands, albums, tracks, and tag them. It’s similar to Wikipedia, but Last.fm also builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste by recording their listening patterns via a plug-in, and then it can recommend artists that you might like or suggest people who share similar musical taste.

That’s it for today.

PS. For the recent Haiti earthquake, what we do know now is that, once again, people first learned about the earthquake through social media sources. Twitter was the leading source of discussion about the quake, and the world was counting on platforms like Facebook and Twitter to get updates on what’s happening. And once again, photos and videos were shared on Flickr and Youtube within minutes, long before the traditional press could get in. Also, the telephone service in that region was destroyed, so those on the ground turned to Skype to communicate with aid organizations and loved ones overseas.

Then came advertisements like Tackfilm, moving in another direction, giving values to the viewers without imposing anything on them. Tackfilm lets you upload photo of a person and it creates a professionally-made short film that makes that person look like a global hero. In 2009 it had nearly 2 million visitors from 200 countries. Tackfilm don’t go out and force people to watch it; most of the visitors found the site through blogs and Facebook — people who watched it loved it and decided to recommend it to other people. This is New Media at its best, and I think advertising agencies that want to survive in today’s world could learn a lot from this simple website.

2) You want better education, stop regarding censorships as a virtue. I once went to an advertising convention and the guy who did the ให้เหล้า = แช่ง campaign told us about how he had to keep fixing the ad again and again because of a shot with blood that the Thai Health Organization didn’t approve of. We censor violence, sexually-related contents, profanity, things that disrupt the national security, sensitive topics, things that go against our accepted assumptions, and so on. Is being honest too much to ask? I would love to see an advertisement that doesn’t have “this product is the best” as the message, but instead suggests that this, among other available products, might work for you. Like a cosmetic advertisement that doesn’t imply it will make you look like a superstar and make other people go crazy over you, you know. Sounds utopian.